


Break the Ice

by Wisteria_Leigh



Series: Prompted Works [12]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: A little angst, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, M/M, The Barns (Raven Cycle), Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 10:24:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17558618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wisteria_Leigh/pseuds/Wisteria_Leigh
Summary: If roles were reversed, and Adam was the one sitting forlorn on the couch, what would Ronan do?“The fuck is wrong with you?”he’d say.“C’mon, let’s go do this dangerous and reckless thing that you can’t say no to because you know as well as I do it’ll fucking help.”Adam had an idea.





	Break the Ice

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by bubble-wrap-me-blog on Tumblr: 21 from [ this list ](http://purrincesscatitude.tumblr.com/post/181823833695/prompt-list)
> 
> 21: “Grab some blankets and pillows. We’re making a fort!”

Magic was a odd thing. Adam remembered the buzz he felt beneath his skin back when Cabeswater flowed through his veins; how the sensation felt weird until it didn’t, how much he ached once it sparked and sputtered and faded out, how he spent days, weeks, months feeling numb until he relearned how to live without it. 

But sometimes he felt traces. Discharge, maybe, from the current that used to run through him. Or it was the magic Calla told him he’d always had; less than what he’d once been, but still something  _ more _ .

He felt it most in the weather. Like how once-broken bones whisper when a storm is coming; his wrist--fractured, once--stiffened when rain was in the forecast. A similar pattern, but a different feeling. A feeling like when he sat in the beamer with his eyes closed, Ronan’s music turned up high and the bass up higher; his body thrummed with energy.

Adam felt the blizzard coming before he heard about it. He’d felt it for days, an undulating hum of pressure shifts and building clouds, in both his broken and unbroken bones. It wasn’t until the crappy radio at Boyd’s interrupted it’s usual late-night programming of endless shitty country pop to tell its loyal listeners to “make sure y’all grab that cat litter, toilet paper, milk, and Wonder Bread, because it’s lookin like it’s gonna be a big one” that he knew for sure what was coming.

Ronan, who was making himself busy one-two punching a tower of tires while Adam worked beneath a 2001 Ford Explorer, said he didn’t believe that shit. Said that he’d lived in Henrietta all his damn life and they’d had plenty of “snow storms” but not  _ once  _ had they gotten more than a few inches.

Adam said that he had _also_ lived in Henrietta his whole damn life and knew for _fact_ that they had a blizzard in 2010, because he had very clear and _very_ unpleasant memories of being stuck in the trailer for a week without a paycheck, without food, and with a _very_ unhappy Robert.

Oh, and he was psychic. So. He won.

They chopped firewood, and filled the barns with extra hay and water. They went to the store, and fought over whether or not Cool Whip counted as a necessity (“If you’re buying hot chocolate or planning on fucking, it is,” Ronan argued; “It doesn’t have nearly enough nutrients or calories to sustain you, so it’s a luxury, not a necessity,” Adam countered; “Then I guess you’re not going to get to lick whipped cream off my body.”; “When have I  _ ever _ said that’s something I wanted to do?”) They unearthed the shovels from the barns still full of Niall’s hoarded goods, and made sure all those loose roof tiles were secured.

Prepping for a blizzard was relatively simple, however, in comparison to the second storm that was brewing. A storm that didn’t require broken bones or magic to see.

Adam noticed, of course, how Ronan seemed tenser than usual, glaring at everything and snarling more often like a trapped animal. The closer the blizzard, the more snow it called for, the sharper his edges became. Adam could distract him for a few hours at a time, putting his hands and mouth to good use, but inevitably that high would fade, and Ronan would return to sulking around the cow barn or burning rubber at the mud track or locking himself in the study.

By the day of the storm, he was in as foul a mood as ever.

“Wasted all that fucking time for the fucking ‘snowstorm of the century’ or whatever shit they called it, and it’s fucking bright as balls out here,” Ronan grumbled as he and Adam went out early the morning of the storm to feed the chickens.

“There’s clouds over there,” Adam noted.

“Just some stupid fucking clouds. Not the end of the goddamn world.”

“Smells like snow, too.”

“That means about as much as your weird meteorological bones.”

“Big word for you at 7 in the morning.”

“Fuck off, asshole.”

By afternoon, clouds hung heavy in the sky, while Ronan continued to scowl and scoff. Adam thought (hoped) that a nap would douse whatever fire was building in Ronan once he saw the flurries start to fall.

“Oh no, such a big, bad blizzard,” Ronan mocked, sliding his ice-cold hands onto Adam’s stomach to make him yelp.

“Gonna get worse from here, you know,” Adam said between yawns.

“Sure. Whatever. Believe it when I fucking see it.”

They only slept for an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Adam woke to Ronan shuffling beside him.  

“Well fuck me in the ass,” Ronan whispered.

Adam dragged himself up from the pillows. Ronan was staring out the window. Thick clusters of snowflakes swirled past the frosted glass. The grounds of the barns was already coated in a dense blanket of white.

Adam smirked and hooked his chin on Ronan’s shoulder. “Told you so.”

Ronan grunted something nasty in response and ripped off the covers.

As the blizzard howled outside, Ronan stormed around inside. He moved furniture with no purpose or reason; poked and prodded Adam like he was itching for a meaningless fight; stomped up and down the stairs, slammed doors, shoved chairs into the table for no reason other than the kinship he found in concussive, angry sounds.

It bugged the  _ shit  _ out of Adam. It always did. But Ronan, like Opal having a temper tantrum or Gansey prattling on about dead welsh kings or Blue reciting a list of wrongs Orla had done her, would eventually wear himself out. And then, maybe, they could talk about it.

Maybe.

In the meantime, Adam avoided him. There was only so much misdirected anger Adam was willing to handle and negotiate, and right now, Ronan was in no mood to consider “chilling the fuck out,” as Adam had asked earlier. So when Ronan raged upstairs, Adam read downstairs. When Ronan crashed about in the basement, Adam busied himself with studying in the bedroom. When Ronan was banging around in the kitchen, Adam waited in the study.

Ronan had spent the past year converting The Barns from Niall’s hideaway to his own. He kept some things the same--his parent’s bedroom remained untouched, except for an occasional dusting or rifling through closets and underneath floorboards to find dream objects too valuable to be left in the locked barn outside. He made some things his own, like the livestock and dreaming barns.

The study was halfway between Niall’s and Ronan’s. The desk was full of farm documents, a laptop, a chewed-up stick, a few odd toys, and glowing dream things, all of which were Ronan’s. The bookshelves were littered with trinkets, books, albums, and folders that were too  _ Niall  _ to be Ronan.

Adam couldn’t fully explain what he meant by that, or how he knew the difference between the two. But there was something--had always been something--about Niall’s things that felt  _ different  _ to him. Colder, maybe. Judgemental, even. He didn’t want to touch them. Never liked how they felt in his hands. They reminded him of the oil under his nails and the worn seams of his shirts, made him feel dirty and unworthy and less-than in a way only handshakes with Aglionby Boys could.

He liked Ronan’s creations far more.

Something crashed in the kitchen. Ronan cursed loudly, violently, with more gusto than was probably necessary.

“You okay?” Adam shouted.

“Fucking shitting fucking  _ fuck _ .”

That was a “yes.”

Adam thumbed through the papers on the desk: farm reports, drawings of Opal with large fangs eating logs and tires and such (drawn by Opal), a couple Post-its with dicks and curse words doodled on them (drawn by Ronan), and a few letters Adam had sent during his first semester of college.

On top of the ancient printer was an open photo album, with one white square in the yellowed pages. The missing photo was in front of the laptop. Adam took it delicately between his fingers.

It was a polaroid of Aurora, sitting in a mound of snow, cheeks flushed pink and caught mid-laugh. Snowflakes lay like a crown atop her long, platinum hair. She held a snowball between her hand-knit mittens.

On the back, in looping scrawl not much different than Ronan’s, Niall had written,  _ January 7th, 1996, a blizzard. Her first snow. My dream, and my heart. _

Ah. It all made sense, now. 

Adam put the photo back on the desk, exactly where he’d found it. He shut the door on his way out.  

  
  


####

  
  


Ronan did, eventually, tire himself out. It took a few hours, still, but he finally settled onto the couch to stare out the window with a scowl still etched deep into his brow. 

The snow was so thick and the wind so strong, they couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the porch. Thunder rumbled and the wind howled.

Ronan chewed on the leather bands and didn’t say a word.

Adam almost wished he’d keep stomping around. Loud and angry Ronan was a beast that Adam understood. Quiet and somber Ronan was something else entirely.

If roles were reversed, and Adam was the one sitting forlorn on the couch, what would Ronan do?

_ “The fuck is wrong with you?”  _ he’d say.  _ “C’mon, let’s go do this dangerous and reckless thing that you can’t say no to because you know as well as I do it’ll fucking help.” _

Adam had an idea. Ronan didn’t even notice when he left.

Adam returned with an armful of quilts and pillows. He dropped them in front of the woodstove. “Get up,” he demanded.

Ronan turned to stare at him. “What?”

“Get. Up. Grab some blankets and pillows. We’re making a fort.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“No.”

Ronan didn’t move. And every second he sat there, eyes flickering between Adam and the heap of blankets on the floor, Adam’s shoulders knotted tighter and tighter. Here he was, demanding his sulking boyfriend build a damn  _ fort  _ with him like they’re  _ seven  _ at an adult-supervised sleepover, Jesus Christ what was he  _ thinking  _ this was so fucking  _ dumb-- _

Ronan stood up. “Alright,” he said, and started pulling the couch cushions onto the floor.

So they built a fort. They left the side facing the woodstove open, and barricaded everything else. And settled in a nest of blankets and pillows, they cooked hot dogs and roasted marshmallows in the woodstove.

“Surprised you wanted to do this,” Ronan said, wiggling a hot dog and his eyebrows suggestively. “I thought your childhood was too fucked up for this sort of shit.”

Adam rolled his eyes and threw a pillow at his face. “I didn’t grow up under a rock, asshole.”

Thunder shook the house. Ronan stared into the fire.

“My mom loved snow,” he said, so sudden and soft that a gust of wind could have blown it away. “She’d always make us go out and play when it was still snowing. Woke us up, sometimes, in the middle of damn night to have us go run around outside. She’d come with us for a bit, make snow angels, throw a few snowballs at Declan.”

Ronan poked the fire. A piece of wood collapsed in embers, sending sparks up the chimney flue. “She’d go back in before us, but would demand we keep playing. And when we’d finally come back in, she’d have donuts and hot chocolate waiting for us.”

“Donuts?”

“Yeah. She made them. From scratch. Coated ‘em in cinnamon sugar, or chocolate drizzle. Best fucking donuts I’ve ever had. Will ever have, probably.”

Ronan tapped his cooking stick on the wood stove. His gaze remained on the flickering flames, seeing something Adam couldn’t.

Lightning flashed. The wind howled.

When Ronan finally pulled himself back into the room, Adam held a s’mores out him.

“Not a donut, but…”

Ronan huffed something close to a laugh. “Yeah, not a donut.”

He ate it anyways.

“Thanks, Parrish,” he said, swallowing a mouthful. He meant for more than just the s’mores.

Adam brushed a smear of chocolate from the corner of Ronan’s mouth. “Anytime, Lynch,” he replied, and let Ronan suck the chocolate from this thumb.

The blizzard raged through the night and well into morning. Inside the fort, however, there was finally peace.

**Author's Note:**

> I personally don't think this is my best work, so apologies if this disappoints! It's been A Week.


End file.
